"Four! Five! Six!" the big bell tolled.
Caroline sat up in bed and dropped her bare, pink legs over the edge. Her eyes were open now, but set in a fixed, unseeing stare.
"Seven! Eight!"
She fumbled with her toes for her leather barefoot sandals and slipped her feet under the ankle straps.
"Nine! Ten!" moaned the bell.
She moved forward, vaguely, in the broad path of moonlight that poured through the wide-open window, and ran her hands like a blind girl over the warm sill, lifting her knee to its level.
"Eleven!"
Before the murmuring aftertones had lost themselves in the night, Caroline was out of the window. She stole lightly along the tin roof, warm yet with the first intense heat of June, dropped easily to the level of the kitchen-ell, and, slipping down onto the massive trunk of the old wistaria, fitted accustomed feet into its curled niches and clambered down among the warm, fragrant clusters. Steeped in the full moon, it sent out its cloying perfume like a visible cloud; her white nightgown glistened ghostlike through the leaves.
She paused a moment in the shadow of the vine, and a great tawny cat, his orange markings distinct in the moonlight, stole to her, brushing against her bare ankles caressingly. As he curled and uncurled his soft tail about her little feet, a sudden impulse caught her, and she started swiftly through the wide backyard, bending to a broken gap in the privet hedge, cutting diagonally across the neighboring grounds, and emerging into a pleasant country road on the outskirts of the little village, with sleeping houses sprinkled along its length, well back, mostly, from its edge, showing here and there a light.
She struck into the soft, dusty road at a quick, swinging pace, the fruit of much walking, and the big yellow cat pattered at her side.